Santa Cruz County’s Marijuana Compliance Team tackling illegal grows

Santa Cruz >> With the marijuana growing season ramping up and the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors’ ban on commercial cannabis cultivation going into effect in mid-May, the Sheriff’s Office newly formed Marijuana Compliance Team will soon be even busier.

Though the new rules still permit personal grows, some pot proponents worry that enforcement means more hardship for patients in need of medicine. The task force, however, is targeting the most egregious growers, who operate throughout rural parts of the county.

In addition to working with dispensaries, the team of one sergeant and two detectives has been working with the county planning and health departments, the District Attorney’s Office, Cal Fire and state Fish and Game on about a dozen cases since mid-March.

Guerilla growers recklessly clear and grade acres of forest and steal from struggling streams, harming troubled salmon populations, according to county officials. They live in and operate unpermitted temporary or makeshift structures without proper sewer and electrical systems that pose fire and health threats. Trash, fertilizers and pesticides proliferate. And there’s been five documented butane hash oil lab fires in the county this year.

“There’s a lot of properties at the Summit, Davenport, Bonny Doon and South County where the before and after photos are pretty startling,” said Sheriff Jim Hart. “Entire hillsides are being cleared. We’re getting weekly phone calls about trees being cut.”

Enforcement efforts for the Marijuana Compliance Team largely will be complaint driven, Hart said. Sites with labs and guns will result in arrests, but responsible growers and medical marijuana patients aren’t on his radar.

“If it’s just involving marijuana cultivation, the answer is not to arrest,” he said. “The answer is trying to mitigate the problems in the neighborhood.”

Horror stories from residents prompted a rule rewrite after the experimental ordinance that was passed in February of 2014 and limited on commercial grows simply failed.

The county knows of 145 illegal grow sites currently, and that number has grown from 84 known in September. Of the 20 sites the county has inspected, not one has complied with the rules, according to Hart.

“The problem with the previous ordinance was that it was set into action before the county was prepared to enforce it, before there was funding to enforce it,” said Colin Disheroon, a dispensary owner and co-founder of the Association for Standardized Cannabis, a local industry group advocating for regulations to help medical marijuana gain legitimacy.

Advertisement

“It was misinterpreted by a lot of people and gave a perceived green light to cultivators from out of the area to come and take advantage,” he said.

The previous rules banned outdoor grows in the Second District and didn’t clearly address collective grows, which in part made them confusing, said Hart. And Planning Department code enforcement officers could only investigate problems with marijuana grows part time.

With the recently passed Measure K, a tax paid by dispensaries, the county expects to generate $1 million annually. About $400,000 of that revenue will fund the new Marijuana Compliance Team to help the county gain some control of the rampant problem.

“We haven’t had a full-time program looking at marijuana,” Sheriff Hart said. “Now that we have full-time personnel assigned to marijuana, I think the next few months will educate us more about what’s going on with outdoor grows.”

As possible legalization of recreational marijuana in 2016 looms, the county wants to change its reputation as a permissive place to cultivate marijuana.

In January, Hart spent a week in Colorado, where recreational marijuana use has been legal for two years.

“They’ve found that with legalization, there’s been a need for much more compliance and enforcement, so I do think that the misnomer to the public might be that it’s legal and there’s no compliance or enforcement,” he said. “But that’s not really the case.”

Current rules allow only 100-square-feet personal grows. Supervisors John Leopold and Ryan Coonerty voted against the commercial cultivation ban, denouncing it as unrealistic.

“We allow the commercial sale of this plant. We should figure out a way for it to be commercially cultivated,” said Supervisor Leopold. “Creating a ban is sticking our head in the sand. Instead we should be thinking about how to creatively manage this.”